Broken Sword Legend Speaks

JamesO writes to tell us that VideoGamer.com recently had a chance to sit down and talk to Charles Cecil, managing director of Revolution Software and father of Beneath a Steel Sky and the Broken Sword series. "when the opportunity to interview the gaming legend presented itself at the launch of Raise the Game, a £450,000 campaign which aims to drive growth and innovation in the UK games industry, we jumped head first at the chance. Read on for news on the next Broken Sword, the possibility of a movie and the state of UK games development. Brace yourself, he pulls no punches ..."

Re:Before you call them legendary

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikipedia is your friend. Congratulations, you just had your horizons broadened.

Pouring millions into game development?

[MiceHead]

Charles Cecil: I think [games are] too expensive. And, while I'll be very unpopular for saying that because the industry is based on it, I think there's going to be seismic shifts. People will only pay for the landmark releases and the hundred million pounds or dollars, you can only afford a few. You look on IMDB and you look at films, I was looking at a film, I'm a BAFTA judge, that costs $50 million to produce and earned hundreds of thousands of dollars. It didn't even hit a million dollars at the Box Office. Now film can do that. How it can do that I just do not understand. How can you knowingly produce a film that costs $50 million, earn less than a million dollars at Box Office and then do the same thing again and again?

I'm going to jump onto the bandwagon and agree that this isn't tenable, and it's because we're ridiculously inefficient about content generation. A Gamasutra article from 2001 [gamasutra.com] posits the following imaginary visual arts breakdown for a project with a budget of $1.1m:
.

ART AND GAME DESIGN (24 months)
Producer 10000 x 24 = 240000
Deisgner 3000 x 24 = 96000
3D Artist 3500 x 24 = 84000
Level Designer 3500 x 24 = 84000
Animator 1500 x 24 = 36000
2D Artist 1500 x 24 = 36000

That's over half the game's development budget to create textures, models, and levels, most of which the player will see only once. As it is, the industry's hits subsidize the misses. I think we'll be forced to look for ways to make individual artists more powerful in the next 5 years.

Re:Before you call them legendary

[servognome]

Americans thing they are right with things being popular everywhere else, but they wrong about that.

Then why is Coca-Cola the 2nd most recognized word in the world, a McDonald's found in over 100 countries, and Baywatch got viewed by 1.1 Billion people a week.... didn't say it was the good stuff that was popular everywhere else.